Saturday, July 23, 2011

Asymmetric Quarks Defy Standard Model of Physics, Suggest New Gluon: Scientific American: In some superconductors, electrons pair up, bound by particle-like vibrations in the material. The bound electrons limit the range over which the electromagnetic force can act within the material, an effect that in turn imparts an effective mass to nearby photons -- particles of light, which carry the long-range electromagnetic force and are normally weightless.
In a similar way, Hill suggests, top quarks and anti-top quarks might pair up throughout the cosmos, bound by a force carried by an as-yet undiscovered particle dubbed the top gluon. "It's as if the entire universe was a special kind of superconductor..."